[First Look] ChromeOS Personalization Hub gets RGB Keyboard backlight color picker

Gamers love their RGB backlit keyboards. I love mine, too! With Steam now available on Chromebooks, and with more powerful ChromeOS devices capable of running it hitting the market, it’s no wonder that Google wants to cater to this demographic of users to give them a higher level of personalization to match their hobby.

In simple terms, it is a backlit keyboard on which the lighting consists of Red, Green, and Blue LEDs. These LEDs can be adjusted to change not only the brightness but the hue of the keyboard lighting. The combinations created with the RGB LEDs is all but endless and it allows you to tweak the color of your keyboard light to fit your personal style and device’s aesthetic. Some keyboards, like my mechanical AUKEY RGB keyboard, come with customizable presets that give you a moving effect for your RGB lighting.

What is an RGB keyboard? – Gabriel Brangers

Back in January, we saw a developer flag appear called “RGB Keyboard“, which sought to give Chromebook owners a software means of changing the backlighting of their keyboard to be different colors based on their mood, but at that time, there was no way to do so yet. That’s not to mention the fact that we’ve yet to see any Chromebook hardware featuring support for an RGB module. Taniks (a Lenovo unit) and Vell (an HP unit) are two devices that have been in development since last year, and we think they may end up being the first.

RGB Keyboard: Add feature flag

– Feature flag to enable support for RGB keyboards on supported devices

Chromium Repository

In addition to these, “Ripple“, which we think could be an external keyboard for ChromeOS may also utilize an RGB module at launch. Thanks to C2 Productions on Twitter, we now have a look at what the aforementioned software interface for changing the keyboard backlighting color on compatible keyboards will look like. As I suspected, it will appear in the newly created Personalization Hub as seen below.

@GabrielBrangers @chromeunboxed @michaelperrigo @jojothetechie @robby_payne
You can now change the Keyboard Backlit Color in Personalization Tab, If your keyboard supports it.
You have to have the flag #enable-rgb-keyboard enabled… pic.twitter.com/pMaoRnHbU8

— C2 Productions (@cr_c2cv) May 2, 2022

Appropriately named “Keyboard backlight”, the new section in the Hub shows your currently selected backlight color (in this case blue to the far left) and that’s separated from the other options with a vertical line. Then, you can swap that with white, red, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, and purple – you know, all Googley colors, of course. Lastly, an RGB option is to the far right showing that you can choose to let your keyboard cycle between all of the colors dynamically and constantly.

This is probably the setting most gamers using ChromeOS will choose, as it adds some variety and keeps things interesting. In order to get this set up, you’ll need to be on ChromeOS Canary at this time, and you’ll also need to have the previously discussed “#enable-rgb-keyboard” developer flag enabled. Right now, there’s no timeline for when this will be fully rolled out on Stable, but it’s nice to see the work finally being done to put it in front of users. I hope that in the future, the RGB option on the Personalization Hub will let you use a hexadecimal color wheel to choose custom colors!